Open Access and the Theological
Imagination

Abstract

The past twenty years have witnessed a mounting crisis in academic publishing.
Companies such as Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor and Francis have
earned unprecedented profits by controlling more and more scholarly output while
increasing subscription rates to academic journals. Thus publishers have
consolidated their influence despite widespread hopes that digital platforms
would disperse control over knowledge production. Open access initiatives dating
back to the mid-1990s evidence a religious zeal for overcoming corporate
interests in academic publishing, with key advocates branding their efforts as
archivangelism. Little attention has been given to the legacy
or implications of religious rhetoric in open access debates despite its
increasing pitch in recent years. This essay shows how the Protestant imaginary
reconciles–rather than opposes–open access initiatives with market economics by
tracing the rhetoric of openness to free-market liberalism. Working against the
tendency to accept the Reformation as an analogy for the relationship between
knowledge production, publishers, and academics, we read Protestantism as a
counterproductive element of the archivangelist inheritance.

Another Reformation?

The past twenty years have witnessed a mounting crisis in academic publishing.
Companies such as Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Taylor and Francis have
earned unprecedented profits by controlling more and more scholarly output while
increasing subscription rates to academic journals. Harvard’s Faculty Advisory
Council signaled the severity of the problem in 2012 when it announced that the
university’s library could no longer afford the rising cost of journal
subscriptions. "Prices for online content from two providers have increased by
about 145% over the past six years," the Council memo reported, "which
far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education
and the library price indices." The memo goes on to cite publisher profit
margins of 35% as one consideration leading to the Council’s conclusion: "Costs are now prohibitive"
[Faculty Advisory Council 2012]. The announcement marked a key moment in debates about scholarly
publishing not only because Harvard Library has one of the largest library
budgets in the world but also because the story elicited attention from the
popular press. As the Guardian reported, "The extraordinary move thrusts one of the world’s
wealthiest and most prestigious institutions into the centre of an
increasingly fraught debate over access to the results of academic
research"
[Sample 2012]. An issue once confined to library budgets suddenly appeared to threaten
agendas in scientific research, to encroach upon monograph budgets for
humanities acquisitions, even to jeopardize public interests.

In their memo, Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council encouraged faculty to consider
open access publishing as one means of alleviating the high cost of journal
subscriptions.[1] In the context offered by The
Guardian report, however, open access surfaces as the only solution.
And as the news began circulating around the academic blogosphere, open access
grew from a single part of Harvard’s strategy for combating inflated journal
prices to become, in the words of one advocate, an "economic imperative"
and a "moral imperative"
[Taylor 2012]. The dramatic incline of rhetorical pitch is symptomatic of a pervasive
feeling that corporate publishers systematically exploit academic labor. The
feeling is understandable. Corporate publishing companies profit from
state-sponsored research and the work of university-supported researchers using
the neoliberal economic model of public-private partnerships. Public
institutions assume the risk and much of the labor while private interests
pursue strong market position and high returns. Even if they do not use the term
neoliberal, critiques of for-profit academic publishers assume
what political theorist Wendy Brown describes as one of the key arguments
against neoliberalism, the claim "that marketization contributes to human exploitation or
degradation… because it limits or stratifies access to what ought to be
broadly accessible and shared"
[Brown 2015, 29]. Advocates of open access publishing raise it as an ethical alternative
to a neoliberal tendency toward unprincipled commercialization of public goods.

We argue, in part, that open access has served less as an alternative to
commercialized academic research than as a moral cover for increasingly
neoliberal policies. Brown’s analysis of neoliberalism is especially helpful
because, beyond identifying new forms of exploitation, she outlines "an order
of normative reason" that organizes progressive solutions to the
injustices of capitalism just as much as the economic policies aggravating those
injustices [Brown 2015, 30]. That normative reason comes into
view when Elsevier reports ending 2015 as the fourth largest open access
publisher–the same year one of its major divisions reported 37% profit margins
[Reller 2016]
[RELX Group 2015]. Far from a moral force for counteracting the
avarice of corporate publishers, open access initiatives have exposed new
strategies for raising revenue, such as collecting author-paid Article
Publishing Charges (APCs) that range from $500 to $5,000 USD [Elsevier OA]. The ability of corporate publishers to easily
assimilate open access into their profit model merits more attention, especially
as open access moves to occupy a dominant position among scholarly
communications in digital media. That move manifested in 2013 when the Research
Councils UK (RCUK) mandated an implementation policy to make all
government-supported research in the United Kingdom freely available online [RCUK 2014]. Canada’s three major research agencies mandated a
similar open access requirement in 2015 [Government of Canada 2016]. In 2016,
the European Union Competitive Council followed suit [Enserink 2016].[2]

These policies arrive after nearly two decades’ worth of work to imagine and
create digital communications systems that would disperse control over knowledge
production. Each mandate has its strengths and its limitations. But none of them
quite fulfills the desire for non-commercial research and less restrictive
publishing contracts that motivated many open access advocates. As Daniel
Allington, a long-time advocate in the United Kingdom, wrote after the Research
Councils mandate, "I feel like a man with a beard in a country where
shaving has just been banned"
[Allington 2013]. His oblique reference to biblical law hints at the fervent rhetoric
framing open access issues. Since the mid-1990s, when cognitive scientist Stevan
Harnad coined the term archavengelism to describe his work to
promote open scholarship, the open access movement has incorporated religious
rhetoric to organize the terms of debate over how and where academics publish.
Evangelical strains of open access advocacy follow the trend of situating open
scholarship in opposition to the rapacious excesses of commercial publishers. In
this formulation, open access publishing carries the power to reform scholarly
communications along the same lines that the Protestant Reformation intervened
in papal control over salvation. The analogy likens the institutionalized
gatekeeping that allowed the church to sell indulgences to the institutionalized
gatekeeping that allows publishers to grossly inflate the cost of producing
scholarly journals. The Internet, unsurprisingly, stands in as a technological
equivalent of the printing press because it allows for the relatively
inexpensive reproduction of text [Graham 2016]. Assuming a moral
universe, the story ends with a social revolution that curtails the corporate
monopoly on knowledge production much as the Reformation ended the papal
monopoly on God’s forgiveness. That conclusion, at least, would fulfill the
non-commercial aspirations archivangelism claims for open access publishing.

Unfortunately, our capitalist world appears more ascendant than a moral
universe. We must take stock of our current situation even as many academics
continue to work for viable not-for-profit publishing models against the grain
of corporate profiteering. How did an apparently anti-corporate project to make
scholarship freer coincide with corporate innovations for extracting wealth from
scholarly communication systems? Part of the answer lies in how different types
of open access achieve the end result of free, online content. While
archivangelists such as Harnad promoted open access delivered by voluntary
repositories–designated as green OA–companies such as Elsevier
created versions of open access delivered by journals–designated as gold
OA. In some cases gold OA takes a form similar to Digital Humanities Quarterly, which uses Creative
Commons licensing that leaves authors with permanent ownership of their work and
lets them reprint that work without seeking permission or paying fees. In other
cases, gold OA takes a form more like Ampersand: An
International Journal of General and Applied Linguistics, which
requires authors to license exclusive rights to Elsevier and charges $1,000 USD
to publish articles ($250 USD for book reviews) [Guide for Authors n.d.]. With the advent of processing fees, some publishers now offer something
designated as hybrid OA, which lets authors comply with open access
mandates (by paying a fee) while publishing in subscription journals. Many
authors choose this option when subscription journals hold a prominent place in
their field. Thus publishers can advertise hybrid OA as an option that gives
authors more freedom to publish where they want while collecting processing fees
for material that appears in journals already paid for by institutional
subscriptions–a phenomenon Research Libraries UK calls double dipping [Prosser 2015].

Unscrupulous uses of hybrid OA manifest a particular problem linked to the more
general problem of academic institutions ceding control over scholarly
communications to corporate interests. Recent controversies involving companies
such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley point to a scenario where free
online distribution of scholarship consolidates rather than displaces corporate
control over academic publishing [Matthews 2016]. As David
Golumbia argues in a recent article, open access mandates not only fail to
resist for-profit publishing but tend to provide more control to the
corporations that own search platforms and databases so central to contemporary
academic research. "OA as it is currently formulated," writes Golumbia, "works to hand more power and profit to these corporate
interests while systematically denying individual producers the right to
much more modest ownership interests in their own work product"
[Golumbia 2016, 78]. The central issue missing from the open access debates, according to
Golumbia, is academic labor. He points to the dismissive rhetoric marshalled by
many open access advocates against so-called gatekeepers as evidence of a
pervasive ideology at odds with the vested interests of researchers, non-profit
publishers, and libraries. Similarly, in the seminal Open
Access and the Humanities, Martin Eve cautions against rhetoric that
dismisses the "necessary labour" provided by editors,
reviewers, and publishers [Eve 2014, 151]. Building on these
critiques, we intend to show how, in addition to lending neoliberal policy the
weight of morality, religiously inflected rhetoric has enabled open access
debates to imagine a world of free information somehow unfettered by the
institutions that produce and organize research.

The model of the Reformation, in particular, dovetails with neoliberal logic by
reimagining institutionally granted access to research materials as an obstacle
to individual participation in a global marketplace of ideas. The religious
imaginary lending credence to anti-institutional sentiment draws on the
theological innovation known as a priesthood of all believers. Martin Luther
placed at the foundation of Protestant reform the idea that all Christians are
priests. While the Catholic Church insisted that the laity needed ordained
priests to mediate their relationship to God, Luther argued that clergy merely
minister to the laity by facilitating access to religious rites. As he put it,
if any clergy "wrest this right from the laity and forcibly withhold
it, they are tyrants"
[Luther 1520]. The grounding belief that faith alone grants laity a right to practice
the sacraments–putting all Christians in direct relationship to God–had
far-reaching consequences for Protestantism. It inspired unsanctioned vernacular
translations of the Bible and produced a scathing view of indulgences.
Ultimately, many scholars connect Reformation theology to the rise of liberal
democracy and laissez-faire economics.[3]

When academics draw on this tradition to frame open access as a moral and
political issue, they do so rhetorically, without methodically addressing
substantive historical connections or analogical correspondences. For that
reason, we identify a theological imaginary operating in open access discourse
rather than a proper theology.[4] Harnad does not offer a Christian
perspective on corporate publishing so much as mobilize the memory of Luther’s
critical theology when he describes his own "Subversive
Proposal" for green open access as part of a "prophetic
vision." Framed in those religious terms, open access resonates
unmistakably with the priesthood of all believers when Harnad references the
Catholic Church’s imprimatur system for ratifying print, predicting scholars "will surely realize that it is they, not the publishers
who merely give it the imprimatur, who are the controllers of the
quality of the scholarly literature through peer review"
[Harnad 1991].[5] As Luther insisted Christians need not
ask the Catholic Church for license to publish religious texts, so Harnad
insists academics need not ask publishers for permission to share their own
writing online. The analogy fails to recognize how publishers enable particular
kinds of complex knowledge production–from assigning DOIs and promoting
circulation to organizing peer review and providing editorial feedback—because
it reduces them to an illegitimate supervisory role.

Given the fraught debates surrounding open access publishing, we want to make
clear that we too think academics should have the right to share their work
online if they so desire. Our contention aims to clarify the mystification at
work when a theological imaginary imbues open access rhetoric with an ethos of
freedom that actual open access policies do not warrant. We focus here on the
religious rhetoric coloring open access advocacy because it has attracted little
critical attention even as the mandates continue to inspire discussions
saturated with religious rhetoric. Those rhetorical transactions perform what
philosopher Hans Blumenberg describes as a "reoccupation" of
historical concerns no longer consistent with present circumstances.[6] When open access advocates position
their cause as a secularized continuation of religious reform, they attempt to
reoccupy a historical moment when new publishing technologies catalyzed the
democratization of knowledge. Such metaphorical comparisons linking Reformation
ideals with the open access movement show how the normative logic of
neoliberalism works beyond policy at the level of rhetorical appeal, doing more
to fit open access publishing for the intellectual marketplace than to clarify
the socioeconomic consequences of free online distribution for
scholarship.[7] Blumenberg diagnoses this sleight of
historical rhetoric when he writes, "A certain specific content is explained by another one
preceding it, and indeed in such a way that the asserted transformation
of the one into the other is neither an intensification nor a
clarification but rather an alienation from its original meaning and
function"
[Blumenberg 1983, 10]. When the content of open access gets explained in terms of the
Reformation, we begin to feel how acute is the need for reform in the field of
academic publishing even as the specific politics of reform grow faint.

Advocates have every reason to want open access to instigate change. However, the
theological imaginary informing expectations for open access moves in exactly
the wrong direction; it accommodates scholarly communications to techniques of
wealth extraction rather than insulating research from market economics.
Legitimizing open access as an evangelical cause forces open idealism to
reoccupy the impossible theological position of our one true salvation in
academic publishing. Blumenberg’s theory of reoccupation pushes us to explicate
unnecessary–and ultimately unhelpful–metaphorical conflations in open access
rhetoric. His view of rhetoric as not merely deceptive but productive of
theoretical thought also encourages us to recognize in rhetorical uses of
metaphor the opportunity to reoccupy worthwhile positions seemingly foreclosed
by the current field of debate, thus reanimating marginalized traditions of
information sharing for our present circumstances. The open concept as derived
from commercial imperatives, rather than moral or intellectual imperatives, has
been assimilated by the rhetoric of open access. Yet we nonetheless see an
opportunity to find a different inheritance in access to libraries. As
institutions designed to support publics rather than markets, libraries can
affirm a need for communities to control their own cultural heritage and
knowledge production. Our hope is that the stewards of knowledge in a digital
age might regain scholarly communications as a public good dependent on public
institutions.

The Evil Empire and Protestant Ethics

One of the easiest ways to see how open access advocates edge toward
evangelism–even when using different terms–is to note the Manichean thinking
that animates the field of debate. Manichaeism, for instance, has transformed
the historic Elsevier logo into a mythological symbol. Subject to derision among
communities that see it as diametrically opposed to the company’s actual
publishing practices, that artifact of print history now illustrates the
alienated meaning that Blumenberg describes as the result of reoccupation. Isaac
Elzevir first introduced the icon used today in 1620 to represent the
interdependent relationship between publishers and scholars [Elsevier n.d.]. It features a tree entwined in grape vines providing
fruit and shade to an old man, with a banner hanging near the bottom branches
inscribed non solus (not alone). Four hundred years later, the
company’s critics have begun to reimagine the icon to convey other meanings
entirely. Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the pirate site Sci-Hub, has compared
Elsevier’s icon to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. By her
reckoning, Elsevier forbids access to scholarly knowledge much as God forbade
Adam and Eve from partaking in the fruit of knowledge [Elbakyan 2016]. The
historical and still necessary partnership between publishers and writers gets
sidelined as Elbakyan raises Elsevier to the status of universal creator. She
proceeds to refashion God as a tyrant, giving us a story of good and evil that
suggests publishers somehow prohibit knowledge production.

Like many others in academia, Elbakyan blames Elsevier for restricting access to
scholarly literature by setting exorbitant prices. Certainly the exorbitant
prices deserve criticism. However, her disdain for academic publishing at large
exploits a Christian framework that leads to the untenable position of pitting
researchers and publishers against one another. Elbakyan appropriated the Eden
metaphor to suggest in a crude way that science, or academia more generally,
should take control of the means of production. Under the right circumstances
open access could help fulfill that goal, but Sci-Hub comes up short because it
relies on the system of institutional subscriptions Elbakyan would see crumble.
Thumbing one’s nose at publishers and research services–even exploitative
ones–hardly displaces the structure of power organized by international
copyright law and academic research. Others have made more plausible suggestions
for undermining Elsevier’s near-monopoly on scientific publishing, but fall into
the same rhetorical trap of equating commercial publishing with a prohibition on
knowledge. British mathematician Timothy Gowers, for instance, organized an
ongoing boycott against Elsevier in 2012 under the name The Cost of Knowledge
[Gowers n.d.]. He encouraged academics to take a
"bottom-up" approach to the publishing problem by
refusing to write for Elsevier, review the company’s articles, or serve on its
editorial boards [Gowers 2012]. Although imperfect for academics
who need to publish in those journals, Gowers’s solution has the benefit of
acknowledging the academic labor of 16,000 researchers as something worth
leveraging. Like Elbakyan, however, the boycott falls into disingenuous rhetoric
when it suggests Elsevier prevents research, as it does with the viral image of
Elsevier’s logo redrawn with locks and chains on the tree of knowledge where
fruit should hang [@FakeElsevier 2012]
[Gowers n.d.].[10]

In reality, of course, Elsevier creates outlets for distributing scholarship
according to institutional and economic privilege. The company has created
serious problems for academic publishing, but those problems cannot resolve in
the current rhetorical tendency to use the company’s name as shorthand for evil.
Invectives against Elsevier are all too common amongst proponents of open access
publishing, if only because mythologizing the company inevitably caricatures the
immoral power structures as dualistic. That quasi-religious dualism emerges when
open access advocates name Elsevier as the Galactic Empire, the big bad wolf,
Halliburton, the Borg, Sauron, Scrooge, Goliath, a parasite, a snake, and
"sort of the Death Star of academic publishing"
[Circasella 2015]
[Ingram 2013]
[Froelich 2013]
[Dobbs 2013]
[Taylor 2013c]
[Brembs 2016]
[Harnad 2015]
[Northrup 2009]. Critics have reason to worry about corporate
publishers that create fake journals or support international arms tradeshows
[Suber 2009]. Couching criticism in dualistic terms, however,
means those same critics end up in the role of open access prophets, publishing
reformers, martyrs, or missionaries with a higher moral calling. These chosen
few, the rhetoric suggests, will oust corporate publishers in favor of
publishing tactics that exemplify egalitarianism, transparency, and access–that
is, openness.

Advocates of open access draw on a range of mythological references to critique
corporate publishers. Popular examples such as The Lord of
the Rings and Star Wars easily mix with
biblical examples such as Goliath and Eden. The combination of secular and
religious dualisms finds a common thread in the Protestant ethic of universal
priesthood. By metaphorically opposing publishers and researchers, they suggest
the entire world can have access to knowledge if only we circumvent
publisher-controlled databases in favor of supposedly unmediated online access.
They propose a polarizing narrative–either support authoritarian publishers or
oppose them, join or delete, buy in or boycott. Those who flirt with evil
provide a cautionary tale inspiring further protests, campaigns, and boycotts.
These narratives suggest that even if formerly independent services like
Mendeley and Social Science Research Network cannot resist the allure of
corporate money, Elsevier users can nonetheless redeem themselves by deleting
their accounts and pledging themselves to open access publishing. Open access
evangelism thus reenacts the old call for repentance and conversion, inviting
academics to set aside their former love for corrupt companies in favor of
intellectual morality.

A few high-profile advocates for open access in particular rely on the language
of morality to make their case. Mike Taylor demonstrates this style of
evangelical rhetoric when he testifies in the Guardian article, "Hiding Your Research Behind
a Paywall Is Immoral." Taylor portrays himself as a convert to open
access. He is a "sinner who has repented" rather than a "righteous man
speaking to sinners." Beginning with a confession about having once
published in toll-access journals, he treats readers to a first-person account
of his transformation. He links to his early closed-access articles as evidence
of his sins, writing, "I heartily wish I’d never done it, and I won’t do it
again"
[Taylor 2013a]. Taylor uses the language of transgression and repentance to set the
stakes of discussions about open access, with salvation or damnation as the
implied consequences of one’s decisions to embrace or reject openness. This
language recalls religious testimonies wherein the sinner publicly confesses his
wrongdoing while affirming the theology held in common by the congregation. The
testimony leverages guilt and community identity to encourage others to follow
the path of the testimony-giver [Knowlton 1991]. Like a pastor
making an altar call, Taylor exhorts other researchers to emulate him in
rejecting priestly authority to publish in more democratic, open access venues.

Mike Taylor is not alone in calling researchers to faith as an open access
evangelist. Michael Eisen–co-founder of the Public Library of Science
(PLOS)–likewise plays on religious tropes to support his ideas about scholarly
publishing. In 2014, he satirically portrayed himself as a disappointed convert
to open access in "Why I, a Founder of PLOS, Am Forsaking
Open Access." In this April Fools post, Eisen acts as a former
adherent to the "religion" of open access, which he once led
as a "personal crusade" while wearing a gaudy "Where
Would Jesus Publish?" t-shirt to stir up attention [Eisen 2014].[12] Eisen uses
his personal account–an anti-conversion narrative–to satirize opposition to open
access and declare his continued adherence to open access principles. While he
references his "Where Would Jesus Publish?" t-shirt
self-deprecatingly in the April Fools post, Eisen has used the slogan with
consistent conviction, if also flippant humor, since 2008 when he first debuted
his WWJP? graphic in a blog post [Eisen 2008]. The apparent irony
of using religious messaging to proselytize for scientific publishing dissipates
when he explains his career-long mission to harness "the Internet’s power"
to make scientific research "more widely available by using a different
business model" than scientific society journals [Eisen 2016]. Circumventing hallowed institutional control over publishing resonates
clearly with a Protestant ethics of reform.

Moving in a similar but more devout direction, some scholarly communications
professionals have earnestly solicited Jesus’s guidance in sorting out the
ethics of academic publishing. Librarian C. William Gee poses Eisen’s question
in the title of his 2010 article, "WWJP?," suggesting
Jesus likely would oppose traditional publishers in the same way he opposed the
power structures of his day–namely cheaters and thieves in the form of the
Sadducees and Pharisees. Gee argues further that Christ would have favored
non-traditional, seemingly unmediated forms of communication, like podcasts [Gee 2010]. Another librarian, Malina Thiede, likewise compares
open access to an upstart religion in the short article, "On
Open Access Evangelism." As a librarian and open access supporter,
she recommends converting faculty members and students to open access by
distributing petitions and pamphlets or by sponsoring public speaking
engagements on university campuses. She continues by cautioning organizers to
select speakers carefully to avoid "preaching to the choir."
Undergraduates, she explains, are "particularly fertile ground for the
message" because most are "idealistic and not jaded by the publishing
system." Continuing with the metaphor, she names institutional open
access mandates as the "holy grail" of campus outreach
efforts [Thiede 2014, 22]. While Taylor, Eisen, Gee, and
Thiede create their own religious imaginaries for their own contexts, each
suggests academia should regard open access as a moral issue. The language of
reformation, conversion, and evangelism lets advocates perform an ethics of
religious reform that invites audiences to set aside old loyalties to the
authoritarian publishing priesthood and enter into a purer, less hindered
relationship with the products of academic research.

In keeping with its evocation of religious ideals, the open access movement has
coupled stories of conversion and redemption with examples of asceticism and
sacrifice. No figure exemplifies that role better than Aaron Swartz, who appears
in open access discourse as a martyr for having suffered dearly in his fight for
the cause. Swartz was a programmer and Internet activist who, in 2010,
downloaded some 4.8 million articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors indicted
him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 for the potential infraction.
While still facing thirteen felony charges, Swartz committed suicide on January
11, 2013.[14] The headlines following his death
formed a public consensus: "Freedom’s Martyr: The Story of
Aaron Swartz"
[Smith 2014], read one, while another contemplated "Aaron Swartz and 21st-Century Martyrdom"
[Stoller 2014].[15] The tragedy of Swartz’s death makes the outpouring of praise for
his work both understandable and sympathetic. Yet the hagiographic terms of that
praise contribute to misplaced contempt for the so-called gatekeepers of
knowledge by situating researchers against any research tool that charges a
subscription fee. As Golumbia puts it, "The contempt looks as if it is directed at a for-profit
publisher that gouges authors and customers alike, yet without
difficulty it turns into an attack on an entity whose purpose is to
support, not profit from, academic work"
[Golumbia 2016, 97]. The universalizing ethics of open access–befitting the universal ethics
of Protestantism–fail to recognize important distinctions between JSTOR and
Elsevier. Elsevier owns and publishes journals, while JSTOR merely digitizes and
distributes them; Elsevier is a corporation, while JSTOR is a nonprofit;
Elsevier charges exorbitant prices, while JSTOR provides its services for
relatively low costs.

The rough comparison makes clear how JSTOR can achieve a symbiotic rather than
parasitic relationship to academic publishing, although we would hesitate to
raise it as a paragon. Rather, we want to suggest how dualistic constructions,
putting subscription tools on one side of a conflict against open access
initiatives, fail to appreciate the complex field of research services. Further,
by lumping together companies like Elsevier and JSTOR, the animus against
toll-access resources fallaciously implies we might secure access to research
materials without the institutions responsible for producing and disseminating
them. Evidence of Swartz’s anti-institutional sentiments appear in a "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" that he published
online in 2008. A representative passage captures the style and message of the
manifesto:

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make
our copies and share them with the world….We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for
Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not
just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge —
we’ll make it a thing of the past.
[Swartz 2008]

Prosecuting attorneys viewed these statements as evidence of Swartz’ intentions
to open access forcibly and illegally to copyrighted information. The charges
they brought against him, had they been carried out, could have sent him to
prison for over 50 years [Cushing 2012]. The aggressive–indeed,
excessive–prosecution contributes to the martyrdom narrative by embattling
law-and-order copyright against open access. Swartz’s Manifesto participates by
setting its own bellicose terms for circulating scholarship online as part of a
crusade. Accepting those terms perpetuates the idea that sharing journal
articles outside of toll-access databases can somehow sidestep the difficult
problems facing academic publishing simply by making intellectual property
rights and publishers "a thing of the past."

The idea of relegating copyright to the past invites the mistaken presumption
that we no longer need the institutions designed to share copyrighted materials.
Libraries in particular can appear as just so many obstacles along the path
toward unlimited access. To question that view of research institutions,
however, one need only point to the file sharing networks that let academics
circulate research outside the legal structure of copyright. Those networks
inevitably remind us that protest piracy relies on the very systems it hopes to
end, as in the case of Sci-Hub, or on private companies that have no
responsibility to academics. An example of the latter circumstance emerged in
response to Swartz’s death when Micah Taylor, Eva Vivalt, and Jessica Richman
created #pdftribute to honor his legacy. The hashtag invited Twitter users to
post full-text copies of articles in memory of Swartz, thus opening access to
that work for public use. By January 13, 2013, the hashtag had garnered some
15,000 tweets and 40 million impressions [Murphy 2013]. Although a
heartening tribute, Twitter links to articles hosted at Academia.edu hardly
offer a sound alternative to the organized collections and discovery tools that
libraries make available to researchers. Trading the library catalog for several
thousand tweets would spell disaster for access. That fact seems surprisingly
counterintuitive in a rhetorical situation that celebrates open access by
imagining Swartz will "live on, a glorious son"
[Vignesh 2013].

From Free to Open

One reason Swartz presents such a compelling figure for so many different
constituencies is because he worked comfortably between the world of hackers and
the world of researchers. Swartz’s facility in different intellectual spheres
contributed to his tremendous impact as an activist. At the same time, that
capacity makes him a clear vector for tracing the flow of ideas about open
access between hacker communities, popular pundits, and academics. Here Timothy
Brennan’s notion of flow elucidates the circulation of ideas as
more than mere influence. In Brennan’s words, flow "suggests a market-generated excitement for concepts
where the borrowing of ideas is concealed in order to enact an
individualized rediscovery of a dominant cliché"
[Brennan 2006, 37]. The cultural clichés Brennan questions have to do with globalization and
many of the same neoliberal policies propelling open access mandates. For our
purposes, dominant ideas about the Internet as a global force for opening
knowledge flow between different intellectual communities, each with its own
motivations yet all trading on the generally positive and far-ranging
connotations of open as unregulated, clear, free, accessible,
candid, public, and transparent. Different affiliations to openness coalesce in
the term’s vague sanguinity and manifest in the rhetorical move to reoccupy an
oppositional stance to corrupt institutions, imagined most dramatically as a new
Reformation. Tracing the flow of open advocacy not just through academic debates
but through a broader appeal to openness in popular discourses will clarify how,
rather than insulating scholarly publishing from market forces, open access
squares with commercial interests.

To appreciate how market-generated excitement can energize a theological
imaginary around open access, it helps to recall that we experience the Internet
differently today than we did in the late 1990s. Those of us who lived through
it probably do not need any reminder of dial-up modems, AOL chat rooms,
Angelfire and GeoCities websites, or the novelty of sharing MP3 files. However,
even folks who feel a twinge of nostalgia at reading those names might need to
check Wikipedia–first launched in 2001–to recall that Wi-Fi was the name of a
brand new trade alliance in 1999 or that the ubiquity of touchscreen technology
was about a decade off yet. The rapid naturalization of such brand names and the
digital technologies they commercialize can complicate the work of recapturing
the heady days of early Internet culture. Yet that historical moment bears some
consideration for understanding debates about open access publishing.
Best-selling titles like The Cluetrain
Manifesto–featuring the popular 95 Theses–and, more recently, Douglas
Rushkoff’s Ten Commandments for a Digital Age make
clear how the turn of the millennium laid the foundation for exploring digital
publishing models in academia according to religious metaphors. With regard to
rhetorical strategy, many of the negotiations over open access publishing replay
in an academic context the contentious debates over open source software in the
1990s.

The most notorious of those debates produced the term open source.
The idea of open source software, much like the idea of open access publishing
that it inspired, took shape in response to increasing corporate monopoly.
Hackers and archivangelists both saw the Internet as a way around
corporate-controlled information access. For hacker communities, the web
provided a means of mass collaboration and distribution that could circumvent
regular software markets. Corporate attempts to control Internet access
threatened to stifle that realm of non-commercial exchange and Microsoft came to
represent the worst of corporate overreach when it cornered the browser market
with Internet Explorer.[19]
Microsoft’s biggest competitor, Netscape, lost most of its customer base to
Internet Explorer in what is now known as the first browser war. In January
1998, as a last-ditch effort to recoup favor among hackers, Netscape announced
plans to release all future versions of their web browser for free and to
license their base code for public use. The idea cut against the grain of
commercial software models by drawing inspiration from the free software
movement, which championed the idea of giving users access to the source code
and distribution rights to encourage people to hack–that is, tinker with an
application’s functionality [Kelty 2008, 105–7].

The plan did not gain traction fast enough to save Netscape. It did, however,
create a rift among hackers and proponents of free software. Netscape’s
announcement inspired a contingent of the free software movement to pursue, as
influential hacker Eric S. Raymond put it, "the serious push to get ‘free software’ accepted in the
mainstream corporate world"
[Raymond 1998]. Before Netscape’s decision to pursue a free software model, Raymond
assumed the emphasis on free and the unabashedly left-leaning
tradition of copyleft activism unnecessarily kept commercial
enterprises at arm’s length. Hackers took pains to clarify how free software
might be compatible with for-profit business models. The founder of the Free
Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, famously encouraged people "to think free as in free speech, not free beer"
[Lessig 2006]. When Netscape invited more mainstream interest, however, Raymond decided
the free software movement needed a makeover that would neutralize its
anti-commercial rhetoric. He started the Open Source Initiative with
business-minded supporters and began the work of rebranding free
software as open source, laying the rhetorical ground
for open access publishing.

Definitions of open source software resonate with the aims of early open access
initiatives and look nearly identical to standard criteria for free software. In
general, open source licensing allowed users to access, edit, and distribute
software without restrictions. The Open Source Initiative aimed at reforming the
cultural politics of free software, not the engineering practices it enabled.
Stallman articulated the critical difference between free and
open software precisely when he expressed concern that "the rhetoric of ‘Open Source’ focuses on the potential
to make high quality, powerful software, but shuns the ideas of freedom,
community, and principle"
[Stallman 1999]. Where Stallman championed a philosophy of users’ rights, Raymond
championed pragmatism geared toward developing better software. The different
motivating philosophies caused a schism that marginalized free software and
aligned open source with corporate interests. Raymond explained that goal with a
short call-to-arms published in the weeks after Netscape announced its historic
plans. There he described the idea of free software as inimical to marketing: "The term makes a lot of corporate types nervous"
[Raymond 1998]. Later he clarified his view that the Free Software Foundation failed
because "its evangelism had backfired"
[Raymond 1999b, 206]. He suggested by contrast that the Open Source Initiative "should be
evangelizing top-down" to convert "CEO/CTO/CIO types"
[Raymond 1999a, 207]. In important ways, the battle over terminology occurred at the
rhetorical level of publicity. As popular Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov put
it, the open source camp "won with better PR," not better ideas [Morozov 2013].

The narrative carried forward by the Open Source Initiative allowed its vision of
free labor, faster innovation, and better software to flow from a relatively
marginal hacker community into the mainstream tech industry on its way toward
the business world. Raymond’s most influential writings, collected in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, argued for alternatives
to proprietary software development by appealing to readers frustrated with
Microsoft’s dominance. With Microsoft playing the role of corporate giant,
Raymond used language strikingly close to Harnad’s to cast himself as an
"accidental revolutionary" and the open source operating
system Linux as "subversive" of slow, centralized development
[Raymond 1999a, 21].[20]
That move fitted his critique for commercial assimilation even as it also
painted him as an iconoclast disruptive of sacred idols. His signature piece,
the title essay in The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
established the dichotomy that convinced decision-makers in the business world
that open source could structure "a succession of miracles"
[Raymond 1999a, 30]. Raymond’s parable characterizes proprietary software like Windows as "cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or
small bands of mages working in splendid isolation"
[Raymond 1999a, 29]. In contrast to those "quiet, reverent" cathedrals, he explains,
open source communities "resemble a great babbling bazaar"
[Raymond 1999a, 30]. That Raymond champions bazaars–marketplaces–announces his difference
from the Free Software movement while also positioning him as critical of big
software corporations. His iconoclasm adopts particularly Protestant
characteristics by objecting to symbols of Catholic hierarchy while arguing for
direct input from autonomous individuals who determine their own mode of
participation.

Figure 8.

Visual notes created at the Open Education Conference in 2012,
illustrating Raymond’s The Cathedral and the
Bazaar (Forsythe, 2012)[21]

Raymond’s deprecation of a quintessentially Catholic symbol linked his essay to a
late-90s zeitgeist of tech writing. That body of literature took the Protestant
Reformation as a model for understanding how the Open Source Initiative engaged
government and corporate powers. Popular publications such as Salon chronicled the open source saga with titles like
"The Saint of Free Software" and "Let My Software Go!"
[Free Software Story 1999]. Thomas Scoville offered one of the more systematic
analogies in his Salon article, "Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds." Torvalds, sponsor
of Linux, not only meets Luther in Scoville’s account but also becomes Luther
for the digital age. Luther’s challenge to papal authority sets the stage for an
elaborate analogy situating the Open Source Initiative as heir to the Protestant
Reformation. Why? "Because Torvalds wants to shift power back in your
direction," Scoville writes. "Because Torvalds’ God, like Luther’s,
wants you to know Him on a first-name basis." He goes on to explain why "the Microsoft papacy is not amused"
[Scoville 1998]. Linux users, the idea goes, had a unique opportunity to reform the tech
industry and individual users’ relationship to personal computing.

The great, insular tech companies stood between users and their computers,
according to this analogy. And worse, they created institutional barriers
between computing platforms that need not exist. The computing reformation led
by open source evangelists promoted self-organized hacker communities that
seemed to operate without such institutional barriers. Nobody was more emphatic
over the Internet’s apparent ability to make corporate institutions obsolete
than David Weinberger in The Cluetrain Manifesto.
He expressed the zeitgeist when he wrote, "The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the
return of voice"
[Weinberger 2000, 39]. In the Cluetrain’s 95 Theses, we see a crystallization of Protestant
ethics aligned with the spirit of capitalism in the celebration of individual
access to markets unimpeded by corporations. Extending the logic forwarded by
the Open Source Initiative, Weinberger characterized all corporations as
cathedrals working to control rather than enable market transactions.

With help from tech journalism, the Open Source Initiative planted the seed for
what has since become a universalizing call for "open source
everything."[22] One leader of that call, Robert David
Steele, makes plain the high stakes advocates place on open source information
technology. His 2012 book titled The Open-Source Everything
Manifesto proclaims the belief that "a public able to access all information all the time”
can build “a prosperous world at peace"
[Steele 2012, xiv]. Extending his vision of open everything beyond the material world, he
goes on to suggest that universal access to information will let humans "become One with God through transparency, truth, and
trust"
[Steele 2012, xix]. Steele’s mysticism takes mass collaboration as the cultural
practice leading to transcendent forms of knowledge unavailable under current
conditions. With a background in government and military intelligence, Steele
bends his suggestions toward better solutions for informing public officials,
such as an open source intelligence agency separate and independent from the
CIA. How mass collaboration would work in such a context remains vague, yet
Steele’s religious conviction in the efficacy of mass collaboration determines
his account of openness as not just a method for sharing computer code but also
a fundamental value for modifying, to his mind, literally everything. Its
tendency toward universalist formulations of open access makes this manifesto a
utopian example of the genre. As implausible as Steele’s political vision
appears, however, the spirit of openness informing it has given shape to new
experiments in state governance, such as Barack Obama’s Open Government
Initiative and the Public Data Group in the United Kingdom.

Open initiatives have entered the political sphere. Yet no single movement or
coherent politics organizes under the sign open. If the initial
rift among hackers implied divergent positions on open source as a concept for
organizing economic resources and social relations, the more recent trend toward
open everything implies an even more diverse field of investment in the term.
That is one reason publishing companies like Elsevier can market themselves as
"unleashing the power of sharing" at the same time they sue university
libraries for disclosing subscription rates [Wise 2016].[23]
Accusations of so-called openwashing suggest such claims amount to empty
branding. As Nathaniel Tkacz has argued, however, the problem of emptiness may
run deeper than Elsevier’s intentions. He calls open an empty
signifier, "one whose very function and appeal rests precisely on
its ultimate vacuity"
[Tkacz 2013]. The vacuity, or at least the pliability, of openness as an intellectual
or political ideal helps account for its traction in spheres as diverse as
software development, government policy, and academic publishing. As sociologist
Christopher Kelty observes, "While free tends toward ambiguity...
open tends toward obfuscation"
[Kelty 2008, 143]. By pointing to strategic obfuscation, Kelty reminds cultural critics
that the rhetoric of open access exceeds the problem of signification to
encompass political positioning as well. Openness, from its conceptualization as
a marketing solution for hackers to its political arrival in the form of new
initiatives and mandates, operates as what political analysts once called a
glittering generality: a vague term with generally positive connotations.

The Politics of Publishing

The antiquated but nonetheless germane concept of a glittering generality
explains the rhetorical success of openness. Who could accept its
opposite–closed access? The idea is not only uninviting but also contradictory,
all the better to ensure the positive value associated with open initiatives.
The Institute of Propaganda Analysis introduced the term "glittering
generality" in their 1937 publication The
Fine Art of Propaganda, which may be the first text to raise
openness to a political ideal. In the course of rejecting undemocratic political
developments in the United States and Europe, the Institute argued for public
discourse "out in the open": "Around the cracker barrel, a spirit of friendly good
sportsmanship has been the treasured tradition"
[IPA 1939, 3–4]. Their defense of democratic principles took aim in particular at
Catholic extremist Father Charles Coughlin. As an anti-Semitic socialist, Father
Coughlin epitomized everything the United States opposed in the years leading up
to World War II. His newspaper and radio program, repugnant in the extreme,
certainly existed "out in the open" in the sense that he made
them available for public consumption. The sense of open that the Institute
advocated did not mean, primarily, accessible. Rather, the authors of The Fine Art of Propaganda gave openness an
ideological value constellated with other democratic virtues such as independent
thought and research. In a world split "as never before between two
faiths," the foreword explained, open discussion offered a mode of
sincere communication that could resist the deceptions associated with autocracy
[IPA 1939, vii].

The ideological sense of openness intended by the Institute for Propaganda
Analysis found philosophical footing in the work of Karl Popper. During the same
years the Institute worked to discredit the rhetorical sleights of
propagandists, Popper wrote his best-known work of political philosophy, The Open Society and Its Enemies.[24] And like the
Institute, Popper understood openness as a political solution to the historical
problem of defending liberal democracy against totalitarianism as it manifested
in fascist and communist states. This line of thinking made open discourses–that
is, discourses open to critique, revision, negotiation–the cornerstone of
democracy. While discourse moves into the foreground, the democratic
institutions that support them appear as abstractions, as when Popper described
an ideal political process as rational: "Only democracy provides an institutional framework that
permits reform without violence, and so the use of reason in political
matters"
[Popper 1962, 4]. Given the context of its historical moment, one can appreciate how
Popper’s opposition to unreasonable discourse and violent reform would appear as
implicitly anti-Nazi even without staking out a political position. More than
any institutional program or framework, however, the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies concludes with a
strong emphasis on "the new faith of the open society, the faith in man, in
equalitarian justice, and in human reason"
[Popper 1962, 189]. By mustering social faith in opposition to totalitarianism, Popper left
the problem of an open politics implicitly linked to liberal democracy and free
market economics as if openness constituted the animating spirit of capitalism.
That meaning of the "open society" grew more prominent in the
second half of the twentieth century within a Cold War context.

The influence of Popper’s legacy on open access debates started to take shape in
the mid-1980s under the direction of billionaire businessman George Soros. While
Popper left the question of institutions abstract but implicitly related to
state power, Soros made them concrete and explicitly geared toward commercial
enterprise. Soros began implementing an economic version of Popper’s open
society in 1984 with an alliance between his primary foundation in New York City
and the Hungarian Academy of Science to establish the Soros Foundation Budapest.
Other foundations in the region followed as Soros labored under the influence of
what he described as "rather potent messianic fantasies" to open communist
states up to neoliberal, capitalist influence [Soros 1990, 3]. "I fancied myself as some kind of god or economic reformer," he wrote
in 1987 [Soros 1987, 362]. By 1993 Soros had created the Open
Society Institute (later renamed the Open Society Foundations) to manage various
foundations operating in the former Soviet Union with his financial support [Hoduski-Abbott 2003, 75–77]. In this way, Popper’s
philosophical faith in reason inspired a push to shape political and economic
forces that, after the Cold War, would create the material conditions of
international knowledge production.

The Open Society Institute’s $3 million grant to support the Budapest Open Access
Initiative (BOAI) illustrates one avenue of influence it used to achieve that
mission. Widely understood as coining the term open access as well as defining
its scope, BOAI first invited universities, libraries, and professional
associations to "embrace open access as a means of advancing their
missions" in 2002 [BOAI 2002]. Inspired by the theological
imaginary that some of its most prominent signatories helped popularize (notably
Eisen and Harnad), the Budapest initiative struggled to imagine libraries and
universities as anything other than a barrier to scholarly communications in
need of reform. Since their first meeting the initiative has periodically
reaffirmed their goal "for Open Access (OA) to all new peer reviewed
research"
[BOAI 2017]. The universal sweep of the mission betrays a misunderstanding of
different institutional missions and different fields of research. Such
extravagant aims conferred urgency and simplicity to the open access message
while it remained a marginal force in academic publishing. Fifteen years and
several important mandates later, BOAI proclaims the same message as if its
implications have not changed.

Part of what we have argued is that the implications of open access advocacy did
change as it moved into the mainstream, starting with the 2012 Research Councils
UK mandate. The religious, especially Protestant, rhetoric that once conveyed
moral opposition to excessive profit margins and unnecessary restrictions on
scholarly communication just as easily informed a neoliberal argument for open
access on the basis of economic development and free trade. David Willetts, UK
Minister of State for Universities and Science, demonstrated the smooth
rhetorical pivot from attacking the so-called cathedrals of corporate publishing
to attacking academic institutions when he made the case for open access in a
Guardian op-ed titled, "We
Cannot Afford to Keep Research Results Locked Away in Ivory Towers"
[Willetts 2013]. Willetts blamed academic institutions for
sequestering research behind paywalls, as if university libraries conspired with
faculty to devise that system of payment. Calling for more
"transparency," he invoked openness in Popper’s sense of
enlightenment rationality and state accountability as a justification for
mandating pay-to-publish gold open access. His argument obscures the fact that
libraries have a method of delivering free content to users, one that
extraordinary inflation and privately controlled online databases threaten to
break. Nowhere does Willetts mention those problems associated with the
corporatization of academic publishing that the open access movement sought to
redress, yet the anti-institutional force of open advocacy carries his argument
all the way to its concluding appeal "to commercialise the fruits of [British] research more
quickly"
[Willetts 2013].

The archivangelists generally do not object to commercial interests comingling
with academic research. Yet, despite including familiar watchwords, the RCUK’s
mandate did not impress them. Mike Taylor greeted a revised form of the mandate
on his blog with a vomiting stickman and called it "the result of lobbying by a truly regressive publishing
industry"
[Taylor 2013b]. Harnad issued an equally disgusted statement arguing that the new
policies would waste money while propping up the status quo in publishing [Harnad 2012]. In April 2015, Times Higher
Education reported that UK research organizations spent more than
£10 million on article processing charges in the first year of the policy [Else 2015]. The trajectory toward corporate assimilation of open
access drove Harnad to declare his retirement from archivangelism in early 2016.
"I fought the fight and lost," he tweeted in an exchange with Michael
Eisen, "and now I’ve left the #OA arena"
[Harnad 2016a]. Even in that farewell note his rhetoric borrowed from a theological
imaginary, this time reoccupying the position of Apostle Paul. "I have fought
the good fight," wrote Paul as he faced martyrdom. "I have finished my course, I have kept the
faith"
[Timothy KJV]. Harnad confirmed his retirement in a subsequent interview that featured
a picture of the "open access archivangelist" pointing to the heavens. His
alienation from open advocacy, he explained, grew over time as he repeated the
same arguments to no avail [Harnad 2016b].

If repeating the same rhetoric of archivangelism did not succeed in achieving
what Harnad hoped, one might fairly suggest a new approach. Protestant metaphors
have provided a convenient rallying point for open access advocates but these
same stories emerged from western socioeconomic traditions that marry well with
aggressive corporate profiteering and suspicion of intermediary
institutions–publishers, certainly, but also libraries and non-profit
organizations like JSTOR. In doing so, open rhetoric has mobilized individual
action without imagining how sustained change in academic publishing might build
on existing information infrastructures. By way of conclusion, we want to
propose a different understanding of online access that does not resort to a
dogmatic universalism bound up with the Protestant imaginary. If the
anti-cathedral rhetoric of open access reoccupies the perspective of one true
religion to offer one true access solution, we want to suggest a
community-oriented perspective that draws on a tradition of public support for
organizing and disseminating knowledge.[26]

We recognize in libraries a centuries-long tradition of caring for
information–its access and regulation; its organization and contextualization–as
a public good that can incorporate various political, cultural, and religious
values. Although neither simple nor unproblematic, the tradition of public
libraries carries with it an ideal of democratic education currently under
threat by a broken model for academic publishing. More practically, libraries
have a variety of access solutions from onsite use and traditional lending to
online viewing and download. More than cathedrals, bazaars, or evangelical
missions, libraries have the potential to support research communities by
investing in not-for-profit knowledge systems. By contrast, the rhetorical
tradition inherited from open source computing weakens democratic publishing
solutions by providing moral legitimacy to neoliberal trends that political
theorists such as Wendy Brown link to an erosion of self-governance. In that
sense, open evangelists, like many missionaries before them, find themselves
implicated in furthering exploitative traditions even as they spread the good
news of equality, democracy, and universal access [Hathcock 2016].
We hope to see open access advocacy invest itself less in circumventing public
institutions–even if their power structures deserve critique–and invest more in
new systems for sharing knowledge that place publishers, libraries, and authors
in functional relation to one another.

Notes

[1] Other suggestions included publishing in journals with
sustainable subscription costs, moving journals to sustainable pay-per-use
systems, unbundling subscriptions, and encouraging professional
organizations to take control of scholarly literature [Faculty Advisory Council 2012].

[2] We want to make clear here that we do not oppose all open access
mandates. While critics such as Jeffrey Beall make generalizations against
open access initiatives, we mention them here only as an index of the
growing importance of open access. We do, however, argue that the growing
prominence of open access publishing requires more attention to the details
of policy and more skepticism in the face of idealistic rhetoric, whether
that rhetoric expresses a pro- or anti-open access position.

[3] Most famously, Max Weber (2001)
argued that Protestant ethics spurred the development of capitalism. For
more recent examples see: [Engeman and Zuckert 2004]
[Waldron 2002]
[Woodberry 2012]. The affinity linking the Protestant
Reformation, liberal democracy, and capitalism need not be understood as
natural to be understood as a defining condition of modernity. That
historical condition is important to understanding why the seeming
anti-corporate rhetoric of religious reform tends nonetheless to reconcile
capitalist goals with open access.

[4] There are exceptions. For instance, Gee
(2010) does attempt to bring theological analysis to bear on deciding where
to publish academic articles when he asks, without irony, "Where Would
Jesus Publish?"
[Gee 2010].

[19] The United States brought an anti-trust suit
against Microsoft in May 1998. The decision, handed down in an appellate
court three years later, found Microsoft in violation of the Antitrust Act.
For a full analysis of the case, see [Weinstein 2002].

[20] The claim that "Linux is
subversive" serves as the opening line of Raymond’s original essay,
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
[Raymond 1999a], and survives in the book editions.

[24] In the preface
to the second edition, Popper writes that he worked on the book from March
1938 to 1943 [Popper 1962, viii]. The Institute for
Propaganda Analysis remained active from 1937 to 1942.

[26] A few recent initiatives
associated with the digital humanities mark positive steps toward library
support for community-driven access. Importantly, these initiatives avoid
replicating the theological imaginary of open access. See the Open Library
of Humanities for an example that encourages collaboration between
libraries, publishers, and scholarly associations [Open Library of Humanities]. For
a discussion of how Traditional Knowledge labels and the Mukurtu CMS
represent more nuanced perspectives on access, see [Christen 2015]. In the sciences, SciELO and Redalyc offer
models of open access that rethink the mandate model for encouraging free,
online access to research. See [Packer et al. 2014].